The almost comprehensive list of software for stock research and investing
The best software for stock research, all in one place. Customers, investors and friends often ask us about the best available tools and resources. We created this list to help make good software more “findable”. The list is updated annually.
We’ve collected lists of investing tools in the following categories:
Forensic research
Full service market intelligence
Market & financial analysis
Expert call aggregators
Insider trading & institutional ownership
SEC filing search & analysis
Research & news aggregators
Financial APIs
Quant platforms
Do you know of an awesome tool that should be added to our list? Our Twitter DMs are open. Let us know! Scroll to the bottom to find Herb Greenberg’s favourite stock research tools.
Forensic resources for finding and avoiding fraud
Make better investing decisions with these free and paid tools that help you identify fraud.
Paid investing software for identifying fraud and fraudsters
Bedrock AI - Bedrock AI is uses artificial intelligence to identify red flags and predict price collapse. Bedrock provides real-time forensic risk assessment and SEC filing navigation through a web platform.
InsiderScore - InsiderScore provides insider trading, institutional ownership and stock buyback information and other data/analytics services.
Probes Reporter - Probes provides alerts on undisclosed SEC probes and analysis of disclosed investigations. They make 2,500 FOIA requests and hundreds of appeals each year so that you don’t have to.
Free & freemium forensic investigation resources
ICIJ (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists) - Offshore Leaks Database - ICIJ runs a searchable public database of offshore leaks so you can check mentions in the Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Bahamas Leaks, and more.
Good Jobs First’s Violation Tracker - The Violation Tracker brings together enforcement data obtained from more than 200 federal, state, and local regulatory agencies - with a company lookup and search tool.
PACER (Public Access to Court Electronics Records) - Pacer provides free/low cost access to case information. Technically they charge $0.10 per page, but they’ll waive fees for anyone incurring less than $30 per quarter (300 pages).
And more.... Refer to "Forensic stock research resources for finding and avoiding fraud" for a complete list.
Full service market intelligence services a.k.a Bloomberg alternatives
The following tools provide access to both financial and market data as well as SEC filings and news.
Free and freemium alternatives to a Bloomberg terminal
Docoh/CapEdge - We love Docoh (now CapEdge). Docoh has financial data, SEC filing search, earnings transcripts, market news, stock alerts and charting. It’s all free and has a great user interface.
EDGAR - Company-reported financial and transactional data is reported to the SEC through the Electronic Data through the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system (“EDGAR”). You can find full financials, XBRL metadata, insider transaction information, prospectuses and more. EDGAR also provides full-text search. EDGAR is free but not trivial to scrape. Refer to the Financial APIs section for programmatic resources.
TIKR - TIKR provides financial tools like a stock screener, financial statements analysis, stock valuation metrics, ratios, charts, news, and filings.
Koyfin - Koyfin is similar to TIKR in many ways. It provides market data, filings, news, charting etc.
FINVIZ - FINVIZ includes financial news, market heat maps, comparative charts, and sector performance tools.
TradingView - TradingView is a stock charting tool with other features including alerts, heat maps, and trading simulations. It also has a stock screener.
Tiingo - Tiingo offers free screening and portfolio monitoring. Tiingo is best known for their API.
Paid market intelligence platforms
Bloomberg - The Bloomberg terminal provides financial and market data, news feeds, messaging, and trade execution services.
S&P Capital IQ - S&P Capital IQ provides more or less everything Bloomberg does without the execution services or messaging. CapIQ has more private company data and often better fundamentals data quality.
FactSet - FactSet consolidates data on global markets, public and private companies, and equity and fixed-income portfolios. FactSet has limited Canadian coverage.
Eikon - Refinitiv Eikon provides news and data services via an “open-technology” platform. Eikon has exclusive access to Reuters news.
AlphaSense - AlphaSense is a market intelligence platform focused on smart search. AlphaSense facilitates search of filings, transcripts, news and equity research.
Market & financial analysis
iBorrowDesk - iBorrow Desk is a tool for monitoring borrow rates and availability using Interactive Broker's freely available data.
Short Squeeze - ShortSqueeze provides short interest data and related services.
YAHOO Finance - Yahoo Finance is a classic. It provides free real-time and historical stock quotes and charting, news etc.
ROIC - ROIC provides 30 years of financial data and news feed on 7,000 companies. ROIC is free.
Most tools under “Full service research tools” also have market and financial data.
Insider trading & institutional ownership monitoring tools
These free and paid tools help you track when insiders trade and/or what stocks institutions are buying and selling.
Paid insider tracking tools
InsiderScore (Verity) - InsiderScore provides high quality, human-reviewed data on insider transactions and more.
BamSEC - BamSEC provides basic insider trading data.
Free & freemium insider tracking tools
You don't have to pay to track what insiders are buying and selling. Explore free tools for insider trading and institutional buying selling: "The best insider trading tracking tools".
Expert call aggregators
Many investors rely on expert calls to better understand what’s really going on under-the-hood at public companies.
Tegus - The Tegus database is a smart-searchable platform of peer-led expert call transcripts by investors for investors. Tegus now comes bundled with BamSEC.
Stream (AlphaSense) - Stream is a library of transcripts and one-on-one calls with former executives, customers, competitors, and channel participants.
SEC filing search & navigation tools
The following tools facilitate search and navigation of SEC filings, earnings transcripts, corporate disclosure and textual financial information.
Paid
Bedrock AI - Bedrock AI is uses artificial intelligence to identify red flags and predict price collapse. Bedrock provides real-time forensic risk assessment and SEC filing navigation through a web platform.
AlphaSense - AlphaSense is a market intelligence platform focused on “smart search”. AlphaSense facilitates search of filings, transcripts, news and equity research.
Sentieo (AlphaSense) - Sentieo provides smart search for filings and other market information as well as table extraction and transcript analysis.
DisclosureNet (Certent) - DisclosureNet facilitates filings search for U.S. and Canadian filings. DisclosureNet is a lifesaver for anyone attempting to use SEDAR.
inFilings (Verity) - inFilings specialises in SEC filings, investment ideas generation, and data mining services.
280First - 280First analyzes unstructured financial data.
New Constructs - New Constructs uses a combined machine learned and human approach to identify items in footnotes etc. that are relevant to assessing earnings quality. New Constructs provides research, ratings and fundamentals datasets.
BamSEC - BamSEC is a search engine and data extraction tool that focuses on SEC filings and earnings transcripts. Watch out for the 7 day trial. If you forget to cancel before the 7 days is up, they will not give refunds on the ~$1K annual fee.
Draftable - Draftable provides blacklines/redlines for both PDFs and word documents and gets good reviews.
Free/Freemium
SEC EDGAR Full Text Search - EDGAR offers free full text search of the full EDGAR database.
SEC Report - SEC Report is in many ways a copy of EDGAR. One cool thing about SEC Report, however, is that they report U.S. senator trading here.
Dudil - Dudil writes company-specific articles about red flags found in securities filings
SEC correspondence
The SEC’s Corporate Finance Division frequently sends letters asking for clarification on or requiring changes to a company’s disclosure. This correspondence between the company and the SEC is eventually made public on EDGAR.
Free
EDGAR - SEC correspondence can be found via a company’s EDGAR page. Look for “UPLOAD” and “CORRESP” filing types.
Paid
Bedrock AI - Bedrock AI provides a unique service whereby SEC comment letter information is extracted from the PDF and presented in an easily readable format, allowing users to identify interesting commentary without downloading PDFs. Unlike EDGAR, Bedrock sorts SEC comment letters by the date the correspondence was made public, and not the original filing date.
SEC correspondence can also be accessed through a Bloomberg Terminal and other full service research tools.
Research/news aggregators and online communities
These tools help bring together equity research, analysis and news in one place.
Harkster - Harkster makes it easy to keep track of all the financial substacks and newsletters. You can view topic-specific newsletter feeds.
Commonstock - Commonstock is an online investing community that amplifies insights from top investors, backed by the performance and portfolio in their linked brokerage accounts.
Seeking Alpha - Seeking Alpha is a large online investing community. Professional and amateur investors and analysts share new investing ideas, discuss the latest news, debate the merits of stocks etc.
Value Investors Club - Value Investors Club is an invite-only online community for discussing stock ideas.
SumZero - SumZero is an online community of 16,000+ buy-side professionals. Members are pre-screened before being admitted.
StockTwits - StockTwits is a social media platform designed for sharing ideas between investors, traders, and entrepreneurs.
Financial news aggregators:
The Fly on the Wall - The Fly consolidates and distributes financial news.
Bedrock AI - Bedrock AI provides real-time, AI generated news sourced directly from SEC filings. See high-impact news before it hits the news.
Emerging Markets Skeptic - News aggregation for emerging markets.
Dudil - Dudil writes company-specific articles about red flags found in securities filings
Benzinga - Benzinga is a financial news aggregator and distributor. They are well known for their APIs.
Financial APIs
Do you prefer to take an algorithmic approach to trading or investing? The following APIs provide stock price, fundamentals and/or other financial data.
SEC API - SEC API allows you to query the SEC filings corpus in real-time, download filings, access historical metadata etc. EDGAR is no longer very “scrapable” so you can’t replicate the SEC API on your own. SEC API is not affiliated with the Securities Exchange Commission.
Nasdaq Data Link (formerly Quandl) - Quandl provides great APIs for a wide variety of data products, including traditional and alternative data sources.
Aspose - Aspose provides .NET, Java, C++ and Python APIs for XBRL processing/creation as well as PDF processing and table extraction.
Services that provide stock price and fundamentals data via API include:
Quant platforms
QuantRocket - QuantRocket is a Python-based platform for developing automated quantitative trading strategies. It provides data collection tools, a research environment, multiple backtesters, and live and paper trading through Interactive Brokers (IB).
We’re still working on this list….DM us your favourites!
Herb Greenberg’s Top Picks:
Herb is a legend. You might know him from his time at CNBC, his work at Pacific Square Research or from the multiple frauds he’s uncovered. You can now find Herb at Empire Research where he writes a monthly newsletter.
We asked Herb about his favourite equity research tools on this list. Here they are his top picks:
Sentieo: Herb uses Sentieo “aggressively” to compare / search filings, transcripts, etc. It’s his main paid research tool and he’s on it constantly. “Easily the most valuable tool I have.”
Seeking Alpha premium: Herb likes Seeking Alpha for the quick data tools and bull/bear ideas as a “first level sweep” of other opinions if he is researching an idea. He says that the secret is to read the comments under the analysis.
PACER: Herb uses PACER for legal analysis. “This is research 101, and is ridiculously cheap.”
Yahoo! Finance: It’s a classic and a habit that’s hard to quit, especially for fast charts, according to Herb.
WhaleWisdom: Herb uses WhaleWisdom to figure out who’s coming into and out of positions in stocks of interest. “There’s a surprising amount here for free, which I shouldn’t say…because now they’ll start charging for it.”
Kailash Concepts: According to Herb, Kailash has fantastic quant tools and innovative research.
New Constructs: Herb loves the quant tools. He notes, “the free research is out-of-the box. I’ve trialed the paid service and would keep it in the mix if I could afford it.”
Bedrock AI: “Bedrock AI is a brilliant screening tool to help QUICKLY sift through filings to help avoid or spot unpleasant surprises in longs while helping to jumpstart the process of finding shorts. It has rapidly become a valuable part of my toolbox.”